Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Reuben J. Miller, University of Chicago 

3:30-5pm, Thursday October 11,

Ustler Hall (162 Fletcher Drive), University of Florida.

While more people are incarcerated in the United States than in any other nation in the history of the western world, the prison is but one (comparatively) small part of a vast carceral landscape. The 600,000 people released each year join nearly 5 million people already on probation or parole, 12 million who are processed through a county jail, the 19 million U.S. residents estimated to have a felony conviction, and the staggering 79 million Americans with a criminal record. Upon release, incarcerated people are greeted by more than 48,000 laws, policies and administrative sanctions that limit their participation in the labor and housing markets, in the culture and civic life of the city, and even within their families. They are subject to rules other people are not subject to and shoulder responsibilities other people are not expected to shoulder. They, in fact, occupy an alternate form of political membership—what Miller calls “carceral citizenship.”

 This presentation examines the afterlife of mass incarceration. Drawing on fifteen years of research and practice with currently and formerly incarcerated people and ethnographic data collected in three iconic American cities, Miller explores what it means to live in a “supervised society”—the hidden social world we’ve produced through our laws, policies and practices—and, more importantly, how we might find our way out.

 The presentation will feature a respondent sharing their own personal experience​ with mass incarceration.

 This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Mass Incarceration and Co-Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Intersections: Animating Conversations with the Humanities (Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), George A. Smathers Libraries, The Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations, and the Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research.  

 Free and open to the public.  For more information contact Dr. Jodi Schorb (jschorb@ufl.edu) or Stephanie Birch (stephanie.birch@ufl.edu), or visit http://intersections.humanities.ufl.edu  

 Download our event postcard.